Number One

Wilkommen to my blog, ye faceless cyber-throngs. I can't imagine many of you will manage to read this, much less return each day, but for those unhappy few who are forlorn and desperate enough crave a daily piece of my mind, you will find here a regular post consisting of three paragraphs: one on politics, one on culture, and one on life (my own and those of others).

This blog will not necessarily have anything to do with Berlin. I just live here, and my first choice name was already taken (by me, if I remember correctly. I can't remember the password though, so maybe I'm making it all up. What a blog it would have been!)

This blog may at times get personal, particularly in the 'life' paragraph. I might change names to protect the innocent, but I don't promise to do so, particularly when none of the protagonists is innocent.

Enough disclaimers.

1. The American presidential campaign has taken a depressing turn as a result of of John McCain's cleverly put together TV ad, Celebrity'. The genius of the ad is that it forces us to get into a discussion about race that goes over the heads of not only most voters, but also most journalists. Would the McCain camp have chosen to compare Obama to white celebutante sex symbols if Obama weren't a young(ish) black man? Almost certainly not. Race provides the discursive glue; it's what makes the ad work. Does that mean it is 'racist'? These are the kind of tricky questions that the Obama campaign can't afford to have us thinking about. Since the ad trades on nuance and subtlety (making it sinister, not 'childish'), it has plunged the media into a nuanced and subtle debate about racial cues and visual mechanisms. It is a debate the Obama campaign can't possibly win, because to win would be to prove that the ad is only as racist as its viewers, and that all Americans suffer from deeply entrenched, unconscious racial prejudices. Fine for a Freshman year literature course, but deadly for a campaign. Journalists, like voters, don't like to be reminded of their baser reflexes, and this is why they have covered 'Celebrity' in a way hostile and damaging to Obama. Democrats should simply try to move on, but next time they need to have ready a more considered and strategic response to McCain's race-baiting feints. Obama probably shouldn't put up any kind of counter-ad, but if he did, the charge he would have to counter is NOT the explicit one that he lacks experience, but the implicit one that he has, as a friend put it, an 'outsized sexual appetite'. Hence, the correct response is a Michelle-and-family ad, not an ad touting foreign policy credentials.

2. I saw "This is England" the other night, a 2006 movie about a young, bullied boy in the North of England who becomes a radical, violent skinhead. It is, to an almost comical degree, a british replica of "American History X", but with lower production values. Neither film is high art, but both are good propaganda. In America, in particular, there is a stunning unwillingness among most writers, artists, and politicians to utter a simple truth: in every country in the world, there is a sizable minority of radical right-wingers who hold views not merely out of touch with but unacceptably dangerous to the democratic majority. One of the main goals of the political system ought to be to contain, marginalize, and ostracize
such people, not to ply or persuade them. Because of the legacy of the Holocaust, Europe generally does a much better job of this. In France, even conservative members of Sarkozy's party routinely stage 'walk-outs' from public debates when politicians from the far-right Front National attend. In England, members of the nationalist BNP (British National Party) are not allowed to speak at Cambridge. In the United States, such people are simply the right-wing of the Republican party. Not the establishment, but not really the fringe either. Whereas the ten to fifteen percent of French men and women who regularly vote Front National are effectively shut out from national politics and (rightly) deprived of a voice, the radical evangelical fringe of the Republican party (not identical to the Le Pen types, but similarly beyond the pale of rationality) gets a very big say indeed. Getting back to the movies though, it is interesting to consider that the closest French equivalent is actually something like 'La Haine' (1995), even though it is about the 'other side': angry banlieu muslim youth rather than white skin heads. All three movies borrow from the same visual poetics of adolescent racial violence.

3. Die Zeit did a 'Dossier' story commemorating the 1968 uprisings in Prague last week, and although the story was pretty boring, the pictures were dazzling. The next time anyone asks me what my 'type' is, I'm just going to say Prague Spring (and if they just think I'm talking about Czech porn stars, that won't be too far off). Kitchy nostalgia might have no place in art or politics, but I'm all for it when it comes to sex. Nothing hotter than good kitch. If only I could force my libido to wish it was living in the eighties! Reagan, Madonna, and hair bands just don't do it for me, which means I'm excluded from about 70 percent of gay culture.